Pioneering new ideas of life and health in the 21st Century. The flagship publication for the most innovative and authoritative writer/speaker/instructor on Understanding Conditioning. While he started out like all his friends wondering how to make exercise harder, his breakthrough idea was making exercise as easy as possible -- and therefore inevitable and unavoidable -- as the only effective lifelong strategy for those activities.

Sunday, July 18, 2010

The Failure of Contemporary Education

Many, if not most, professional "educators," would have us believe that in order for one to learn anything, one has to first pay them a lot of money and assure them lifetime job security, for them to sacrifice themselves by letting us in on what they presume to know -- making learning a function of time, money and control, rather than the simple process of paying attention to the realities of what is going on.

Properly, one then creates a general theory to explain what is going on, and not demand instead, that the reality must conform to their "theory" or "conjecture" of what is going on -- that more often than not, is a faulty understanding of the process.

In fitness or exercise (conditioning) activities, that is invariably that "more is better," without first understanding what is the process in the first place. It is simplified even further that simply making the heart beat faster, or slower, accounts for greater capability for actually doing anything meaningful or productive -- when the fact of the matter is that a specific objective must be measured for anything to be really meaningful -- and not just that in "putting" or "shooting," the faster one can get their heart to beat, the greater one's chances of success. Following that logic, the more one putts or shoots, the better one becomes -- rather than the more valid observation, that the accomplished and proficient at anything, actually uses less attempts (effort) to accomplish immeasurably more.

That is a qualitative difference, rather than simply a quantitative one. That is the fallacy of measurement, which presumes and assumes that all things are otherwise equal -- when that may be the biggest difference. The economy of effort is what differentiates the average from the exceptional. That is the beauty and art of movement (or for anything for that matter) -- and not who looks like they are producing the greatest expenditure of effort, suffering and "sacrifice."

In that way, the popular notion that proper conditioning is the measure of the greatest expenditure of effort and energy, is the focus on the wrong things and measurement. In everyday experience, the objective is to move as effortlessly, gracefully, and easily, rather than making the simplest things a monumental and extraordinary effort, causing much pain and suffering in the doing so -- and thinking that is a major accomplishment, let alone a desirable conditioning (education), requiring a platoon of health advisers to achieve and support. Obviously, that is done for the benefit of the trade associations of fitness/health professionals, and not for the individual desiring the greatest economy of expenditures for maximal benefits -- for themselves.

But as life becomes more institutionalized and bureaucratized -- even in the name of "public service," we lose that connection to the simple realities -- and come to regard the explanations as the reality, and to prefer it -- until one day, there is a critical failure of that theory to match up with reality, and most people then, simply give up on trying to understand anything thereafter, because they think all knowledge and information has betrayed them.

And so the great quest of truth, is to find and identify the exceptional rare few, who do not think this way.